A little poem for today

It turns out this is my 60th post. That's pretty good, all things considered. To celebrate, I give you a poem by the fabulous Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. Look him up on Wikipedia.

Here's one for the guitar, which is the most popular instrument in the Western world, by a factor of 10 (so I'm told).

Ode to the Guitar

Slender,
perfect profile
of a musical heart,
you are clarity itself captured in flight.
Through song you endure:
your shape will never pass away.

Is it the harsh grief
that pours out of you,
your thrumming beats, or the
buzzing of wings:
is this what I'll recall?
Or are you
more thoroughly thrilling
in silence,
the dove schematized
or a woman's hip,
a pattern that emerges from its foam
and reappears: a turgid, tumbled
and resurrected rose.

Beneath a fig tree,
by the rough-running river Bio-Bio,
you left your nest like a bird
guitar,
and delivered
to swarthy hands
those long-lost trysts,
muffled sobs,
and endless successions of farewells.
Song poured out of you,
a marriage
between man
and guitar,
forgotten kisses
from an unforgettable, unforgiving lady.
In this way the entire night
became
the star-studded body of a guitar.
The firmament trembled
in its musical canopy,
while the river
tuned its infinite strings, sweeping towards the sea
a pure tide of scents and sorrows.

O rich solitude
that arrives with the night,
solitude like bread made of earth,
solitude sung by a river of guitars!
The world shrinks to a single drop
of honey, orone star,
and through the leaves everything is blue:
trembling, all of heaven sings.

And the woman who plays
both earth and guitar
bears in her voice
the mourning
and the joy
of the most poignant moment.
Time and distance
fall away from the guitar.
We are a dream, an unfinished song.
The untamed heart
rides back roads on horseback:
over and over again it dreams of the night, of silence,
over and over again it sings of the earth, of its guitar.

-from Odes to Common Things, 1954-1959